Is Time to Fire Your Call Center?

Copyright (c) 2009 Randy Harmat

Over the last decade call centers have become the anonymous faces of business. And though the call center business has grown by leaps and bounds the problem remains- the ANONYMOUS FACE. Inspite of personalization of call center scripts customers can instantly make out that the customer service representative from the company is actually from a call center.

Call Center Services have grown tremendously in the last decade. The reason is that companies are saving on the bottom line by cutting costs and outsourcing this work by opting for these services. The CCS faces a lot of challenges which surrounds customer experience. If you try find respond of customers of CCS, only one-third of them register positive responses! The agents have to shoulder responsibility not only to sell the products of the company but also establish brand equity for it through various channels. Some of the common problem of these services is high employee attrition, absenteeism, inconsistent answering performance and poor call quality. An often carefree attitude within a call center directly affects the overall performance of the call center.

A few of the service complaints of CCS are failure to resolve customer problems in one call, accumulation of clutter in reaching the appropriate representatives or to qualified supervisor if the problems not solved within five minutes of calling, failure to create credit among the customers especially in outsourced customer care centers. First of all, do not treat your CCS as cost cutting centers. Do not cut on training and quality control measures. In your haste to cut the cost you will lose on quality services to your customers and lose reputation and ultimately revenues. Improving the functioning of your call center must include these- efficient deployment and use of labor, effective leveraging of technology, capacity management, and demand management.

Coming to the internal functioning of CCS, there should be absolutely no lack of communication among the agents and customers. Only communicating through e-mails is not enough. It is easier and cost effective nowadays to be in touch trough the internet. Provide your account manager with as many voice interactions with the customer. Language and cultural difference of the customers is another problem in CCS. This problem needs certain contact points between the customer and service providers make way for smooth execution of any project. The offshore CCS has more problems with the accent of the customers. In this case it is advisable to go on a Live Chat. If any target is missed by the service providers, the party that will decide on the payment withholding needs to be defined frankly. This will assure that the service providers will never make frequent errors and will be extra careful.

The CCS should take extra care to keep its customers updated on a weekly basis. They should always feel they have got track of their project. It ensures less errors and hassles at the time of project delivery. Call centers generally lack leverage to invest in innovative technologies and strategies. Using knowledge base applications helps in managing the information load and keeps the agents up-to-date on the latest marketing based promotions. There are many communication applications such as Voice of the Customer (VOC) which helps to make the workforce more effective and reduce cost.

Greater effort should be make to encourage customer feedback through prompted questions and unstructured feedback which is then mined using speech analysis. You must absolutely make sure that your agents do not type when they are talking to the customer or take multiple calls and talk to more than one customer at a time. This will ensure that the agent is actually listening to the customer and 100% attention is given to the customer. Ongoing alignment is necessary because expectations are a moving target. Innovations, competitors' moves, and economic and social trends are some of the forces that cause continual morphing of customers' expectations. CCS is a consumer-centric business; this should kept in mind all the time.

All Call Centers should make themselves well equipped for call floods. At such times it happens that the calls are routed to inexperienced agents and results in consumer dissatisfaction or even frustration. Be pro-active and invent solutions for any imaginable situation at your center; make a strategy and develop a call routing strategy and test them in advance to cope with the actual problems when they arise.

There are many technical solutions available such as extension of voice of the customer program. You may also establish a call handling service, which would report about out of the service phone lines before the customer does! Make sure your agents can flag problems (such as slow pop-up windows or poor voice quality) during a call. If the quality has already deteriorated, it is no use rectifying the technical lapse later. You should also pay attention to forbid any fraud perpetuated by the agents which might involve false representation of data. There should be constant detecting of problems of the IVR systems.

The agents too need to have some fun and relaxation sessions. The call center management and employees should stay current all call center news and trends. Subscribe magazines or create a library shelving books and reports for the employees whereby they can increase their knowledge and skills. All this help in planning a customer service program that works for both their employees and customers. You will be able to address the customer needs all the time and making them happy even though they may not satisfied with the product or service. You may also subscribe to newsletters and whitepapers for the knowledge growth of the members of your Call Centre.